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Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

danielmiessler.com

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#41

I tried iTerm for about a year. After getting fed up watching it lag or crash all the time. I definitely went back to stock Terminal and haven't looked back.

It's definitely gotten better. I've been running the iTerm 2 beta release and it never crashes. I've literally never had a crash after I began using it.

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#42

Why is this article so Mac oriented? So here's tip 9: Use a nice Linux or similar machine with a pleasant to use clicky keyboard and a mouse which allows text highlight and middle click paste.

Or create a vagrant VM that almost emulates your web deployment server and develop in it while using any OS you like for other purposes :).

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#43
post #26

"7. Use vi-mode in Your Shell" Tried this and gave it up. Your shell may be (somewhat) vi compatible but the applications you use mostly are not so you'll have to break out of the vi mindset at all sorts of inopportune moments. That, and modal editing, while perfectly alright for text editing, maps rather lousily to command line operations. You're much better off getting used to some basic Emacs-style key bindings th…

What I did, for example, was that I enabled vi-mode in my shell but also re-enabled some emacs-keybindings like CTRL-E and CTRL-A for ending and beginning of a command because I learned them like a lifetime ago when I first got used to the shell without even knowing they were emacs-keybindings. But that way I am also able to hit ESC and do a / for a search, like within vim, which I am much more used to than a search…

I use vi-mode in my shell but the end/beginning Vi commands (A,I,0,$,etc) are the only ones I find myself using regularly. I also use c[motion] and d[motion] on occasion, but that is pretty much it.

I'm not convinced that powerful editing is necessary for the command line, but familiar shortcuts for beginning/end seem very useful.

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#44
post #35

1. Remap Your CAPSLOCK Key Another upside to this is that people will gradually stop asking to use your laptop 'for just a minute'.

Remapping the arrow keys to switch between Vim windows instead of moving the cursor is a great way to achieve that goal. ;)

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#45

Why is this article so Mac oriented? So here's tip 9: Use a nice Linux or similar machine with a pleasant to use clicky keyboard and a mouse which allows text highlight and middle click paste.

While I partially understand where you are coming from (OSX specific articles bug me in the same way that Ubuntu specific or Fedora specific articles bug me), you can have sensible mouse behavior outside of just Linux. When I work on Linux from a windows box I find that Putty's support for middleclick-paste works great (putty can be annoying for other reasons, but it can be made to work okay).

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#46
echo "set editing-mode vi" >> ~/.inputrc

This will turn on vi mode for anything that uses the readline library (there's a good chance your favorite database command line uses it and any other apps that also use the readline library)

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#47
post #10
post #3

Caps remap is my favorite. My pinky is much happier.

I do this as well, but I sometimes question whether or not it was worth the frustration when using a colleagues computer.

There are certain kinds of customizations that I think are backwards compatible in a way. No matter how many custom mappings I make in Vim, when I am using someone else s settings I have never had an issue with not having them. Maybe if that other person also happened to use the colourscheme I like that would be different.

For whatever the reason though, capslock/escape remapping is not one of those changes for me. Working on a machine that doesn't have that is absolutely crippling; it takes a great deal of effort to not constantly hit capslock.

My solution is to only use my own computers. Mileage may vary. ;)

Re: Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity

#48
post #21
post #3

Caps remap is my favorite. My pinky is much happier.

As any book about RSI will tell you, you should not use your pinky finger for pressing Ctrl regardless of whether it's mapped on Caps Lock or on the default key.

Does the same apply to shift? I think that should be a far more concerning key than Ctrl.
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